


What The Right Hand Is Doing

by Gryphonrhi



Series: Advent Amnesty Stories [1]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe, Gen, Hydra -- creeping everyone out since at least 1945, I reserve the right to finish this after all!, WIP Amnesty
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-12-02
Updated: 2016-12-02
Packaged: 2018-09-03 18:40:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 804
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8725906
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gryphonrhi/pseuds/Gryphonrhi
Summary: Everyone knows the Winter Soldier has a metal arm.  Not everyone agrees which arm.





	

19?? -- ??

He thought at first that he must have left the message.

The handwriting was almost right, the wordings were ones he would have used, and the Winter Soldier had found them in a cache he'd picked out as perfect for his uses and almost impossible for anyone else's. Most people couldn’t move the boulder and wouldn't risk the scorpions or snakes that could have slithered in.

A metal arm, however, didn't mind fangs or stingers.

The strongbox in there was basic steel, unpainted, and safely anonymous in its commonplaceness. The lock opened to one of the sets of numbers he routinely used; to the one that a small series of scratches indicated it should, in fact. So at first the Winter Soldier thought he'd simply lost the memory of creating this stash. 

The handlers stole so many of his memories and imprinted so many more he'd never actually had, that it was a reasonable suspicion.

The problem was that whoever had written this was almost certainly left-handed.

Winter Soldier turned his left hand palm-up and then back over again, studying the metal plates as they shifted smoothly under the desert dust. Then he pulled the notebook over, took the pencil that had been under it –- thicker than usual, he noticed, and full of what looked like red clay or red wax instead of graphite –- and tried writing left-handed.

The pencil held up to his metal hand, even if this was finer control than he usually tried with this hand. 

The words he wrote randomly looked passable. They were legible, anyway, whether he tried Cyrillic, Roman, or Arabic lettering. They didn't look anything like his usual handwriting, however. Not as much as the note he'd found did. 

The slant of the letters now – that matched the note he'd found.

Winter Soldier stared at it again and shifted the pencil over to his right hand, rewriting the message he'd found. The spacing between words matched, and the lack of spacing, for that matter. All of it did, except the slant.

What the hell?

He looked down and realized he'd written just that, in English. He shifted to Russian to add, "Who are you?" In Arabic, he wrote, "If this is a trap, check the strength of your net." 

He stuffed the pencil and notebook back into the box, sealed it again, shoved it back into place, and tugged the boulder back.

He added the necessary (almost artistic) scattering of dust and debris to hide it from habit and professionalism.

It didn't occur to him to make sure his random writings really were random.

< * > * < * >

It was his handwriting and it wasn't. Right-handed, not left, but the writing was the same, down to the heavier press on one stroke where that one Arabic letter always tried to go the wrong directions.

He tried the pencil in his right hand, hoping the pencil wouldn’t snap under servos used to applying more force. 

When he copied the phrases, they looked the same: same spacing, same punctuation. Just slanted differently.

He studied the words more carefully, looking for patterns. Two heads, fire, control, mind, dreams, sleep. Almost random, almost connected. The sharp-peaked doodle along the top looked like the view from a strong house he'd used outside Salzburg, oddly enough. He remembered the house fondly; he'd slept there, slept well, and a morning of surveillance via pastry shops and cafes had kept him from feeling hungry. That was a rarity.

So he replied, "Who are you?" in Arabic, shifted to Russian to ask, "How are we doing this?" and finished up in Finnish: "I'm the Cold Steel."

He added a string of almost-random words of his own: barley, frost, juniper, water, granite, lipstick, silk and shifted the paper around sixty degrees before sketching the archway into a training center he remembered, however faintly. It had been cold, and windy, and he'd been exhausted, work-blistered, cold-blistered… and relieved. He remembered being relieved and being surrounded by people who could be trusted to sleep at his back.

Maybe all of it was a dream, but if so, so was the safe house near Mondsee and he remembered the layout there as if someone had sketched it for a blueprint. (Why did he remember the hands now? Smaller than his, and then larger, but hands, known down the scars on the knuckles and that one mis-set finger joint when they were small….)

His head hurt, more than just the mild dehydration of the desert, so Steel buried the cache again with his right hand, ignoring the scorpion strikes at the flexing plates. He covered it with sand and scree and stood up.

Going to Salzburg had just become a priority. Salzburg and then northern Scotland.

His handlers would have to disappear.

He planned their 'defection' half the way back out of the desert.

< * > * < * >

**Author's Note:**

> Where this came from: A couple years ago, I saw some mirror-image animated gifs of Winter Soldier and wondered, "Would Hydra be mad enough to clone another Winter Soldier when they gained the ability to clone? And if they did... would they take off the second one's arm, to have a backup up? Or take off his right arm to confuse everyone..." (Yeah, I know, but... Hydra.)
> 
> This is what I have so far.


End file.
